Hougoumont was the key to the Allied position, a fortification whose defences never fell, despite the terrible punishment its occupiers endured, and whose resistance served as a metaphor for Wellington’s tactics during that long day. By the close of battle, hundreds of its defenders had died, but Hougoumont’s survivors claimed divine protection when a fire stopped, miraculously and marvellously at the feet of the figure of Our Saviour in the chapel, and barely singed His toes. Charlotte Waldie, on holiday in Brussels, visited the château a few weeks after the battle and found herself in a different world.
‘The carnage here had been dreadful. Amongst the long grass lay remains of broken arms, shreds of golden lace, torn epaulets, and pieces of cartridge-boxes; and upon the tangled branches of brambles fluttered many a tattered remnant of a soldier’s coat. At the outskirts of the wood, and around the ruined walls of the Château, huge piles of human ashes were heaped up, some of which were still smoking. The countrymen told us that so great were the numbers of the slain, that it was impossible entirely to consume them. Pits had been dug, into which they had been thrown, but they were obliged to be raised far above the surface of the ground. These dreadful heaps were covered with piles of wood, which were set on fire, so that underneath the ashes lay numbers of human bodies unconsumed.
‘At the garden gate I found the holster of a British officer, entire, but deluged with blood. In the inside was the maker’s name – Beazley and Hetse, No. 4, Parliament Street. All around were strewed torn epaulets, broken scabbards, and sabre tashes stained and stiffened with blood.’
When it was over, the French had lost half their men, while the two opponents who had united against them, the Anglo-Allied army led by the Duke of Wellington and the Prussian army led by General Blücher, had lost a third: out of 190,000 men who took part in the battle, the French casualties totalled more than 30,000, the British and Dutch, under Wellington, about 15,000, and the Prussians lost about 7000 men. At one point, 45,000 men lay dead or wounded within an area of three square miles. Half the 840 British infantry officers were dead, and their cavalry had lost a third of its number. The 12th Light Dragoons alone lost three officers, two sergeant-majors, five sergeants, three corporals and thirty-eight dragoons.
Despite the death toll, the soldiers themselves remembered it as a glorious victory. But in the stories they told of the battle they did not forget its horror, even if none of them appeared to dwell unduly on the cost. Among the survivors was Private Tom Morris of the 73rd Foot, who described how he had roamed the battlefield in search of water after the fighting had ended: ‘By the light of the moon I picked my way among the bodies of my sleeping as well as of my dead comrades … I thought I heard the man call to me, and the hope that I could render him some assistance overcame my terror. I went towards him, and placing my left hand on his shoulder, attempted to lift him up with my right; my hand, however, passed through his body, and then I saw that both he and his horse had been killed by a cannonball.’ Another soldier from Staffordshire, Frederick Mainwaring, found a loaf of bread in a French officer’s knapsack, covered in the brains of a British guardsman. Mainwaring was so hungry he scraped off the brains and ate the loaf. Captain Cavalié Mercer of the Royal Horse Artillery remembered that ‘from time to time a figure would raise itself from the ground, and then, with a despairing groan, fall back again. Others, slowly and painfully rising, stronger, or having less deadly hurt, would stagger away with uncertain steps across the field in search of succour. Many of these I followed with my gaze until lost in the obscurity of distance; but many, alas! after staggering a few paces, would sink again on the ground, probably to rise no more. Horses, too, there were to claim our pity – mild, patient, enduring.’
Only at first light did the men begin to comprehend the enormity of their sacrifice. Captain Mercer buried one of his drivers, James Crammond, simply because his injuries were so horrifying. ‘I had not been up many minutes when one of my sergeants came to ask if they might bury Driver Crammond. “And why particularly Driver Crammond?” “Because he looks frightful, sir; many of us have not had a wink of sleep for him.” Curious! I walked to the spot where he lay, and certainly a more hideous sight cannot be imagined. A cannonshot had carried away the whole head except barely the visage, which still remained attached to the torn and bloody neck. The men said they had been prevented sleeping by seeing his eyes fixed on them all night; and thus this one dreadful object had superseded all the other horrors by which they were surrounded.’
An ensign, seventeen-year-old Edward Macready, calculated that of the 460 men in the 30th Foot, 279 were casualties. Sixty-nine of Captain Mercer’s horses were dead, and more than 1500 in all. ‘Some lay on the ground with their entrails hanging out, and yet they lived,’ wrote Captain Mercer. ‘These would occasionally attempt to rise, but, like their human bedfellows, quickly falling back again, would lift their poor heads, and, turning a wistful gaze at their side, lie quickly down again.’
Hougoumont, still smouldering, smelled of burnt flesh and death. It looked, thought John Kincaid of the 95th Rifles, as if the world had nearly come to an end. ‘The field of battle next morning presented a frightful scene of carnage; it seemed as if the world had tumbled to pieces and three-fourths of everything destroyed in the wreck. The ground running parallel to the front where we had stood was so thickly strewed with fallen men and horses, that it was difficult to step clear of their bodies; many of the former were still alive, and imploring assistance, which it was not in our power to bestow. The usual salutation on meeting an acquaintance of another regiment after an action was to ask who had been hit? But on this occasion it was “Who’s alive?”’
The villages around Waterloo were filled with the injured, their churches acting as hospitals. In Brussels, the mayor launched an appeal for its citizens to take as much bedding as they could to the Hôtel de Ville, especially mattresses, bolsters, bedsheets and blankets, and to give linen or lint to their local priests. But it would take several days until all the injured had been recovered, taken by wagon to nearby farm buildings or cottages. Accidents caused the death toll to rise still further: ‘Two of our men, on the morning of the 19th, lost their lives by a very melancholy accident,’ Kincaid recalled. ‘They were cutting up a captured ammunition waggon for firewood, when one of their swords, striking against a nail, sent a spark among the powder. When I looked in the direction of the explosion, I saw the two poor fellows about twenty or thirty feet up in the air. On falling to the ground, though lying on their backs and bellies, some extraordinary effort of nature, caused by the agony of the moment, made them spring from that position five or six times, to the height of eight or ten feet, just as a fish does when thrown on the ground after being newly caught. It was so unlike a scene in real life that it was impossible to witness it without forgetting, for a moment, the horror of their situation.’
A professor of military surgery, John Thomson, saw one patient whose neck had been cut by a sabre, revealing part of the brain which was seen pulsating for eight weeks. There were many victims with sabre wounds to the face and neck, where the eyelids, nose, ears, cheeks and lips had been divided, wounds which were held together by adhesive straps, and by bandages. In many cases, bullets had passed directly through one or both eyeballs. There were many chest wounds, too, some inflicted by the lance and bayonet; but most by musketballs. There were patients whose bladders had been penetrated by musketballs, and, in several cases, men had lost large portions of the buttocks and thighs to cannonballs.
More than five hundred amputations were carried out by the surgeons in an age without anaesthetics, their most famous patient Lord Uxbridge, whose knee had been shattered. He talked calmly to his surgeons as they cut through his flesh and bone, in a house a few miles from the battlefield, and he was heard only once to complain, when he remarked that the knife did not seem very sharp. ‘Take a look at that leg,’ he commanded his visitor, Sir Hussey Vivian, pointing to the severed limb which was still in the room. He regretted its loss deeply. ‘Some time hence, I may be inclined to imagine it might have been saved.’
Wellington was far from immune to the human cost of victory, to the lives wrecked and to the men racked with pain in Brussels hospitals. Many of his friends and fellow-officers were dead, a mournful list which included a dozen of his senior staff. ‘Do not congratulate me. I have lost all my friends,’ he insisted, on his return to Brussels. Many men died from exposure as they lay on the battlefield for two,